It's About Russia

A Collection of 20th century Russian paintings, Washington, D.C.

BY HILDA HEI NAM LEUNG

RUSSIAN ART is more than sweaty, muscular men building power lines with victorious smiles. As an exhibition of 50 Russian paintings at the Smithsonian International Gallery in Washington, D.C. demonstrates, those socialist realism propaganda posters that have come to unilaterally signify Russian art over the last century only represent one aspect of the country's artistic output.

Modernism Is The New Classicism

Because artists of Russian modernism who are more familiar to the American public-such as Malevich and Kandinsky-have been omitted, the exhibit's 45 artists can shine without eclipse. At the entrance viewers see The Bathing of the Red Horse (1912), the most famous painting by modern master Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. A monumental red horse dominates the big canvas, and a naked boy with a frail yet strained body rides it as a whirlpool twirls below them. There's a lot to take in-the sinister, apocalyptic air, the semi-homoerotic teenage body. A pioneer of "spherical perspective," Petrov-Vodkin's paintings are both modern and unmistakably Russian. The flat, egg-shaped face and the bright but limited palette reference the Byzantine iconic paintings of Old Russia.

Prostitute at the Hairdresser's (1914) is by Mikhail Larionov, who led the neo-primitivism movement and depicted the lower classes in his "provincial series." From the gray and dusty looking canvas emerge objects with inverted perspectives and proportions. The prostitute, whose calves are unusually compressed, sits on a two-legged chair. She holds up a translucent newspaper that somehow props up a solid, wooden brush. The barber's face in the mirror has no eyeballs. A thin, faded, man-like cat stands vertically against a woman's thigh in the background.

Filip Malyavin's Village Girl (1903) is dazzling in color, like all his works on the Russian peasantry. Malyavin's girl wears the characteristic multi-color, textural dress, but his painting isn't a mere display of national costume; it's really a play of visual illusion. The brown hand that covers her mouth appears to be her own-but there are her sleeves, dangling next to her thighs! The gray mass behind her head could be her billowing cuff, but it looks more like the face of a malevolent stranger.

Socialist Realism Is The New Modernism

Moving into the Soviet era, we see paintings that depict the everyday life of ordinary citizens. Perhaps wailing widows exchanging tales of the war and lamenting their lost husbands is not a commonplace picture, but that is what Victor Popkov paints in Remembering Widows (1966). Popkov, a hero to the 1960s generation of young artists, rejected the state's doctrine of social realism. Instead of glorifying life in the USSR, he depicted people in difficult times. His widows are resilient yet withdrawn, feminine yet estranged, altogether unlike those gregarious, optimistic Slavic souls that the party sought to present.

Those gregarious souls do not go unrepresented in the International Gallery, however. In Nikolai Baskakov's Milkmaids, Novella (1962), three women rest in a sunny field, roaring with laughter from a splendid story, maybe about cows and pastures, but most likely about sex. Zinaida Serebryakova's The Russian Bathhouse depicts four similarly carefree women enjoying the steam, naked.

Equally naked is Geli Korzhev-Chuvelev' Marusya. The reclining, voluptuous female naps on the wooden floor with a comfort and sensuality similar to that of Manet's Olympia, with one key distinction-Olympia the courtesan wears a velvet choker; Marusya wears a bandana and work boots. She's the worker, not the sluggish, sexualized native in Gauguin's The Spirit of Dead Watches Her, who idly awaits her master's lust.

In a way, these paintings are more fun than Malevich's non-representational Black Square, because every painting depicts a story-or fantasy-of Soviet life. Curated in part from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the exhibition is free of charge and on April 10 will move to the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis.

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Hilda Hei Nam Leung B'05 is one of Brown's five graduating Slavic Studies concentrators

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